Category: 2016 Festival Updates

Our corporate partner Aurizon have generously provided funds to transport guests to and from the main events and partner venues throughout the weekend – this is such an amazing gift for our community and we are truly grateful.

There is parking at all the venues if you decide to do your own thing over the weekend. Please drive safely and responsibly.

The FREE buses are available as follows…

Friday 20th October

From Hunter Tent Stay to Peterson House for the Bubbles & Beats Party from 6pm

From Peterson House to Hunter Tent Stay to get you home safe from 10pm

On Friday, Saturday & Sunday we will be welcoming rainbow families of all shapes and sizes to Nanna Kerr’s Kitchen for a family lunch served picnic style on the grass (under cover or inside in the case of rain). There will be entertainment for kids of all ages and heaps of fun and games; fur babies welcome too.

Our friends at Macquariedale Organic Wines are supporting us with the event and will be releasing Say YES celebration bottles to support the LGBTIQ community. We will have limited edition Stunning Shiraz 2016 and Cheeky Chardonnay 2016 vintages for sale at just $7 glass or $35 a bottle to be consumed on-site.

You’ll also be able to purchase the specially commissioned bottles from Pokolbin Pride for delivery to anywhere in Australia very soon.

Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for helping to make the inaugural Pokolbin Pride a reality.

With 5200 followers on Facebook we saw almost 600 people come out to the Hunter Valley over the festival and 243 people along to the party on Saturday night featuring Sisco Electro, Luke Antony and DJ Dom De Sousa.

We are delighted to announce the dates for Pokolbin Pride #2 – Friday 20th October to Sunday 22nd October 2017. Make sure you are on the mailing list to receive up to date information about the schedule and early bird tickets.

As the Founders of the festival we have decided to launch two initiatives to keep the momentum going…

Pokolbin Pride Sundays at Nanna Kerr’s Kitchen

every Sunday from 2pm to 5pm we are offering a share platter and two drinks for $45; we want to create a regular space for the LGBTI community in the Hunter Valley to hang out – friends and families welcome.

Rainbow High Teas at Nanna Kerr’s Kitchen

Nan’s High Teas are one of our most popular items in the restaurant – from Thursday 10th November all our High Teas will be rainbow high teas and $2 from every sale will go directly into the Pokolbin Pride fund to help make the festival happen each year.

Of course the festival couldn’t have happened without the help of the local businesses that lent us their space, staff, creativity, enthusiasm, insights and financial support…

How to get around…

Rover Coaches with services to and from Newcastle on Saturday & Sunday – book online

Have a wonderful Pokolbin Pride!

A note about the calendar

We have updated the festival calendar and removed some of the scheduled events that weren’t getting enough love.

Please appreciate that this is year one, with no council, regional government or tourist association funding so we cannot afford to run events that looked like they would be making a loss – this is a social enterprise and we want to make sure it’s a success so that we can get bigger in year 2, 3, 4 and beyond…

We have organised dinners and canapé receptions with entertainment and speakers.

On Saturday 22nd October there’s a evening party hosted by Tatler’s Wines; free parking available.

We will be announcing more events and activities up until the 17th August. Then a downloadable calendar will be available here and printed calendars will be distributed by our partners and through LGBTI media and venues throughout Australia.

ACON is just one of the LGBTI organisations set to benefit from Pokolbin Pride 2016

Matty and I were on our way back from a camping trip and visiting his Mum and Dad in northern NSW our first real ‘holiday’ since we moved to the Hunter Valley in July 2016.

We were chatting away about how proud we were of what we’d accomplished and sharing our mutual frustration that we hadn’t really spent enough time cultivating new friendships in our new home.

It was the weekend of Lovedale Long Lunch which sees up to 20,000 people a day visit seven wineries in the Hunter Valley.

“There should be a LLL for the gays” said Matty innocently “then we’d make some new friends”.

When we first launched the Facebook group ‘Pokolbin Pride‘ we both thought we’d end up hosting a lunch sometime at our restaurant, Nanna Kerr’s Kitchen, and connecting with some of the LGBTI locals that we knew were out and about but we just hadn’t met them yet.

What happened next was astonishing…

Overnight we gained about 400 followers, mainly locals, all voicing their excitement that someone was creating a gay and lesbian festival in the Hunter Valley

Not really knowing what to do next we said we’d announce the details of the festival when we hit 3000 followers (we thought this would kick the project into the long grass for a bit)

About 10 days later we’d notched up about 3100 followers

True to our word we’d did a quick sense check of what else was going on in the valley in the spring and found a ‘clean’ weekend (20th to 24th October 2016)

We now have a five day festival of LGBTI events and activities being hosted by us and a collection of other businesses in the Hunter Valley running as a social enterprise

Our ‘corporate’ kicked in and we created a survey to ask our audience what they wanted from a regional LGBTI event and we’ve shared the results with business community – Cessnock Council threw a business networking event so that we could share the story and more than 100 people showed up.

The outcome is that we’ve put together a calendar of events that the community said they wanted – this won’t be a Sydney Mardi Gras in the vines.